GaryPinC

My impression was I don't think he's given it much of any thought. Probably impressed with how the organization is being run during the sale process and will mostly leave it be. Pegulas seem like very simple, straightforward people which is refreshing to see. I mean, the guy drove up to Traverse City to watch the jr. Sabres play and was listening to WGR on the way back. For all his wealth he is just a regular guy. Love that him and Kim were driving from New England to NYC and had their dog with them on the hot day they stopped by to see Robert Kraft and brought "Sidney" with them to the meeting. Love how Sully asked his question and Pegula stumbled through a rough "no changes" answer and ended it by saying "but today's a happy day" Terry's not a deep thinker but people, Buffalo, the teams, and this region seem critically important to him. The interesting thing in all this is Terry could have all the local entrenched politicians by the balls if he really wants to push the Niagara region forward and beyond sports that is truly exciting.

After Marrone and Whaley had that argument in the preseason it became apparent that Russ Brandon is one of Tim's "sources inside the organization". I'm guessing that's why he's fairly definitive about things. Probably hints to Russ's future with the organization.

No one's making him a saint. I don't know Robert Kraft's total charitable donations but I'm sure they are not limited to this one instance and many, including myself, appreciate the fact he was willing to step up and take action to help in this unique circumstance. It's always sad when people such as yourself have to throw down some judgmental pettiness over a voluntary act of kindness.

I can believe it. I don't think Jairus really wanted to stay here in the first place but I do believe the FO factors in player health/injury risk when deciding if or for how much they will re-sign a player. As it should be.

Pretty interesting what the Steelers DB's on the sideline were saying to Glazer about Manuel when the 2 teams worked out in Latrobe. I want EJ to succeed but I do think Marrone did the right thing

Is sitting and learning behind a veteran QB really the difference? Brady, Rogers, Manning, etc all have the ability to read a defense and make quick, attacking decisions. With accurate throws. The difference between the franchise quarterbacks and the best backups is arm strength and aggressive decision making. Both types have to be accurate enough and read a defense well enough to be consistently effective. You have to worry because Manuel has problems in 3/4 areas. I hope the time off allows him to regroup, excel and be the man for us. But at this point I'm not confident.

The WR's and team will eventually stop putting the effort in. I agree with you, got to force Manuel to take some shots. Sadly, it appears we missed the boat with Pettine. I've been really impressed with how the Browns play ball. They aren't afraid to take chances despite not a lot of talent, no receivers, a solid but noodle-armed quarterback, decent but not spectacular o-line. Yesterday vs Baltimore with about 2 minutes to go Cleveland got the ball around the 10 and leading by one. I knew Pettine would throw for the first down (which the receiver dropped) and I wondered if Marrone/Hackett would have just done 3 straight runs. Got to be aggressive. Our biggest problem on offense by far.

Why blame the media? The NFL and Goodell have declared themselves judge, jury, and executioner in their efforts to clean up the image of the league. Some of the punishment is spelled out, some of it is highly subjective. Most of the time it revolves around banned substance use/abuse. All these criminal incidents have people questioning if the NFL is properly dealing with this end of its image. Bravo. Let's see how the NFL responds. And there are a ton of great, down-to-earth, humble guys in the league. Playing a violent game doesn't justify violence in life. If these guys need help get it for them or fire 'em. What's the policy of your average publicly owned company if you as an employee get convicted of similar crimes?

You really don't have to look hard to see how screwed up the chicago river still is: http://www.epa.gov/Region5/chicagoriver/ I live within 15 minutes of the Grand River. It is a designated state scenic river and has a few minor pollution issues but is generally healthy. It got put on the endangered list because the environmental group is worried that any future fracking operations nearby will destroy the Grand's ecosystem. It hasn't happened yet but I guess that was their criteria. http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/05/grand_river_on_endangered_list.html Our sewage contamination into Lake Erie only takes place after heavy storms, much like Chicago's though we do not routinely dump 70% partially treated sewage into the rivers as Chicago likes to do. Our rivers all flow to Lake Erie, we never needed to reverse flow on any of them just to spew our sewage in a different direction from our drinking water intakes. How you come to feel that we are doing something very wrong compared to what goes on in Chicago is inexplicable. We completely treat our sewage but the system simply cannot handle heavy storm sewer loads. We are in roughly similar boats. I am not blowing off pollution risks to the Pacific Ocean. I feel your perspective of those risks are blown way out of proportion. Your pointless panic-mongering on the Fukushima contamination (which is negligible) and is no risk to the Northern Pacific by Alaska or the entire west coast for that matter.

So, I don't know where the truth about global warming lies. As a scientist, there is tons of dogma and problems with both sides. I would strongly disagree the science is settled. I thought I'd share my simplistic way of looking at this issue. The data are relatively simple (not a lot of modeling) and it actually highlights quite well the amount of dogma being injected. My first go-to site: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ It tracks sea ice area for the arctic and antarctic. It has a paradigm or model for calculating areas, but it should be a fairly consistent model and it is updated daily. It also has this fantastic set of graphs along the right margin: http://nsidc.org/arc...-sea-ice-graph/ So you can track sea ice area over individual years. It is easy to see how we have been gradually losing sea ice over the decades the AGW people preach about. If you look at the minimums part (which we are now approaching) and individually click in the years from 2013 back to 2006 you have to wonder if we haven't hit the minimum since 2012 and are in a slow upswing. If you look at the maximums level around February, you can see that maximum extent for 2014 is surprisingly low due to the unusually warm winter up there. But I can tell you from checking bulletin boards of climate scientists that based on that low max they fully expected a far lower minimum than we will see this year. Minimum ice area will most likely be slightly increased or equivalent to 2013. AGW people think it's an anomaly in the trek to zero sea ice but is it? Time will tell. The other site which actually calculates arctic ice volume is PIOMAS: http://psc.apl.washi...volume-anomaly/ Looking at the first graph: http://psc.apl.washi...CurrentV2.1.png You see the downward AGW touted trend but since 2012 you have to wonder where the increasing volume will take us. When you couple all this with the recently flat Global temperature average and how temps haven't followed most of the predicted models you really have to wonder. Bottom line to me is that the next several years should shed some light on where the truth lies. Antarctica: Another great example of trying to find the truth. Antarctic sea ice has been well above average (see NSDIC site) but AGW folks are saying the loss of land ice well offsets it. Most of the "global warming" induced loss comes from the western end of Antarctica and actually ice thickness is increasing on the eastern end but not enough to neutralize the loss. Problem I have is there are active volcanoes under the Ross ice shelf on the continent and active undersea volcanoes in the Western Antarctic Ocean. http://www.techtimes...tarctic-ice.htm http://news.national...ience-tsunamis/ I couldn't find any of the global warming people trying to ascertain the contribution or changes in volcanic activity as it relates to the melting. Oh well, hopefully somebody will directly address it with some research. Bottom line is I'm just focusing on the polar ice data. Just some food for thought.

Interesting thing ridiculousness. I wonder if there is any body of water on this planet truly pristine, ie unspoiled by the chemical pollutant effects of man? Maybe in the remotest of places after much searching? The presence and pollution of humans is everywhere on this planet. What then qualifies as pristine these days? You are attempting to compare the 660-700 million cubic kilometer Pacific Ocean to the 23,000 cubic kilometer great lakes. Let's not forget the fact that the great lakes region was and still remains an industrial manufacturing and population hub which has polluted every one of the great lakes over many years. I live just east of Cleveland and enjoy going to the beautiful lake Erie beach less than 15 minutes from my house on a hot summer day. Except when it storms 24-48 hours before, which blows out the sewage holding tanks at the treatment plants and dumps them straight into the lake spiking bacterial counts until nature cleans up the mess. Since 2011 we have initiated project clean lake: Project Clean Lake is a $3 billion, 25-year program that will reduce the total volume of raw sewage discharges from 4.5 billion gallons to 494 million gallons annually - See more at: http://www.neorsd.or...h.aeFgqbIY.dpuf This will do nothing to address the PCBs, mercury, dioxins and other pollutants which account for strong fish consumption advisories on every one of the great lakes. I'm 44 and the visible quality of the great lakes has improved remarkably since I was a kid but the slope of that curve will flatten out because it will take many decades for the pollutant levels to fade. I am a fan of the great lakes and highly recommend to anyone a trip up to the western and northern areas of Michigan. Great stuff up there. But compare the fish advisories for Michigan (surrounded by great lakes) with Alaska: http://www.epi.hss.s...s/rr2007_04.pdf http://www.michigan....y03_67354_7.pdf Which one of these would be considered far closer to pristine? As far as the radiation: http://www.forbes.co...ast-of-america/ "The amount of Fukushima radioactivity in this seawater is miniscule, about a Becquerel per cubic meter of water, or Bq/m3 of short-lived Cs-134, and poses no concern at all. And never will. By comparison, the EPA drinking water standard for its sister radionuclide, Cs-137, is about 7,400 Bq/m3, and for all radioactive materials is almost a million Bq/m3." Ridiculous indeed.

Totally agree. Possibly the focus of the next Whaley/Marrone argument?

Ah, some spicy stuff to kick off the season. Just wanted to throw a couple thoughts out there for the discussion: 1. Looking at Tim's tweets here and then at the Buffalo News story he wrote, his unnamed "source" appears to me to be Russ Brandon. Something to remember in the future. Once the story gained enough traction, Russ decided to come out of the shadows. 2. Interesting that the "fire me" quote/joke occured later at a smoothing out dinner between the parties involved but got thrown into the main story. 3. Obviously the conflict was between Marrone and Whaley/Monos. Monos because he was not at the public fight but was at the make up dinner. Whaley says all the right things but he is a young GM and I do sense a good size ego under there. Conflict about value and use of the talent. 4. LaCanfora's source obviously does not like Marrone and is tied to Whaley or Monos but is neither of those two. Too much gossipy venom. "Saint Doug" was probably a joke started somewhere in the GM/scouting Department and twisted for the article. 5. I respect the fact that our head coach is strongly determined to do things his way. When's the last time we had that? 6. I'd like to think the spat helped both parties understand each other. Hoping LaCanfora's gossip spew helps them mature and work together better also.

I guess one other way to think about it is to look at our first team run defense. Weren't very good at it last year but are doing well in preseason when the ones are in. Is that meaningless? If our run defense tanks and is near the bottom of the league again and Schwartz stays as DC to coach next year and run defense looks really strong in 2015 training camp do we hide it or severely limit our scheme so it looks like crap in meaningless preseason games? Give me a break! Final score doesn't matter in these games but our coaches are trying to be effective with the ones, even if they limit playcalling or schemes to a degree.

Maybe later in the game but not when you're going 1st string O vs 1st string D. They want 7, especially when we sucked at it the previous year. Not like we're the seahawks or niners here.

+1 well said. Does anyone truly believe that there's some arsenal of hidden plays that will dramatically increase our red zone effectiveness once the season starts? Red zone effectiveness is about execution but also about keeping the defense off balance with the playcalling. Fakes, snap counts, motion, etc. Is it so vital we do none of that to keep it off tape? You can fake on tape and then not during the next game. The fact that we are so ineffective at running screens is another symptom of play calling. They need to be called when the defense is crashing and over pursuing around the LOS. Are we saving the real screens for the regular season? Afraid to put it on tape? I don't think so. Just poor playcalling and execution. Teams are sniffing out our screens no problem.

Except they didn't and the server was "rude" about it so mom decided to change the kid on her chair to make a point to the restaurant. Mom is an azz hole because there are more sanitary ways to deal with the situation but the restaurant did have a deficiency too.

Let's not forget about this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2014/04/02/buying-buffalo-bills-would-save-donald-trump-a-fortune-in-taxes/ Not my expertise but sounds like the RDA is a pretty significant perk.

Championship! Yes!!!!

First off, your link doesn't work. Here's the actual link: http://www.amjmed.co...e/S0002-9343(13)00200-3/pdf Edit: This isn't working either. Go to AJM and search Murray A. Mittleman Here's a CDC link with incidence of type 2 diagnosis by age: http://www.cdc.gov/d...cs/age/fig1.htm I included the CDC link as a general relation of age related changes to body physiology -The AJM study has 4600 particpation, 579 of which are current users which is only 12.2% of your study population to base your conclusions. -45% of current users are under age 30, 60% of them also smoke tobacco, 77-78% of never or past users are over age 30 12% and 28% respectively smoke tobacco. Refer to cdc graph. -Never used it is more racially mixed (~56% white) than past or current users (70-77% white). -Currently using group is 66% male, 34 female. Other 2 groups are closer to 50/50. -Directly from the paper page 586: Because people with diabetes mellitus may alter their marijuana use habits, we also performed a sensitivity analysis excluding participants with diabetes mellitus. Hmmm. Not a huge percent of the study population but I do wonder if they also excluded diabetes participants from the "never used" group. Trust me, don't assume they did. Seems to me they could have addressed this in the survey! Certainly very convenient to exclude diabetes patients with their higher numbers from the much smaller "currently using" group. -Non users have never smoked it, past users smoked from once in their life to not within the past 30 days, and current users at least once in the past 30 days. So someone who smoked it once as a teenager and is now 59 is lumped in with someone who smoked regularly for years but gave it up 30 days ago. Not a good way to classify this group. Sorry Bob, not the smelliest study I have seen but right up there. Physicians are required to have a certain # of research publications as part of their training and quite a few of them choose to pore over vast libraries of collected study data hoping to ferret out statistically significant correlations which may or may not be a false positive. Doesn't matter to them as long as it gets published. There's a good chance that happened here, And yes, it happens in prestigious journals like AJM all the time. Personally, I don't put much weight in these results. Your second reference with the pretty picture and orphan receptor has no relevance to the marijuana discussion from what I can see. Did I miss something about it?

Thanks much for discussing. Sorry to hear that you have this affliction and am glad the marijuana helps. As I mentioned, the legalizations should help push the research, hopefully it also helps prescibing physicians step up and discuss their experiences with patients also.

As a contrast, it's amazing the agitation I experience until I silence Tom. Who really likes listening to a mewing, anorexic weasel anyways? Does that qualify as a medical benefit of pot?

Interesting. So does smoking marijuana help with your sleep? Ah, thanks for clarifying. As a researcher, I have to caution you about trying to say why someone reacted a certain way to marijuana. The strain balance may have been fine, the person may have just been unusually sensitive to THC and/or insensitive to CBD. Hard to say exactly why. Human physiology is amazingly complicated, I spent years working on appetite supression/obesity. What a quagmire of overlapping biological processes! I think the more people who benefit medically from marijuana separate themselves from the recreational users the better. I too have seen a number of users who seem to use the medical angle to justify their recreational addiction and that's really harmful to advancing the medical benefits. People who never used it before finding medical relief are/would be especially powerful advocates. At this point with all the legalization the research should really take off. But I appreciate the opportunity to discuss with you. As someone who has never smoked pot and probably never will, has witnessed friends drag their lives into a tailspin with it, and have known even more people with a profound psychological addiction to it, I also recognize that it is a mild, low toxicity drug that may have some real medical benefits. Intelligent discussions with people who have first-hand experience that I do not are always valuable. Thanks!

Bob, Happy to oblige. I understand your frustration and it's part of the reason I'm not a frequent poster. Your point about losing therapeutic effect from isolating components is an excellent one. A significant part of my background was working with small pharmas in drug discovery and I would say as a general mentality managements want the one miracle drug for a cure but it didn't take me long to realize that barring someone suffering from a specific molecular deficit (say leptin resulting in obesity -which is common in mice but not humans!) most diseases and disorders will need to be treated with a combination of compounds. Problem is, beyond breaking a mentality, no one wants to deal with the additional regulatory hurdles needed to gain approval; it's hard enough to get a single novel compound approved by the FDA! And now you have multiple sets of side effects and metabolic break down components! One way around it is to pair with an existing approved compound and that has been happening with more frequency. But I'm out of drug discovery so my current knowledge of the field is a little more spotty. But it still is worthwhile to isolate individual components from cannabis so they may be studied and quantified (elucidate pharmacology). As far as claiming better effects of marijuana over marinol, I would have to see the study design. Critical would be that the participants would never have used marijuana before and that there's an arm that first tried marinol for an appropriate time before trying marijuana. This would account for the physical and psychological addiction to marijuana. What state legislatures are trying to ban CBD and what's their justification? Sounds like it's non-addictive and non-psychoactive.

Thanks for the links, sounds like a company that is doing good research and the review paper looks interesting so I will dig through later. A couple perspective things I wanted to offer. All compounds have side effects, whether man-made or natural. Pharmaceutical products have at least been rigorously studied with their doses and side effects quantified. GWpharm has an interesting paragraph: Of the cannabinoids listed above, only two cannabinoids have to date been well characterized – THC and CBD. Both THC and CBD have important pharmacology: THC has analgesic, anti-spasmodic, anti-tremor, anti-inflammatory, appetite stimulant and anti-emetic properties, whilst CBD has anti-inflammatory, anti-convulsant, anti-psychotic, anti-oxidant, neuroprotective and immunomodulatory effects. CBD is not intoxicating and indeed it has been postulated that the presence of CBD in cannabis may alleviate some of the potentially unwanted side-effects of THC. There is currently limited scientific information on the pharmacology and toxicology of the other cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are believed to be effective in suppressing muscle spasticity, spasms, bladder dysfunction and pain symptoms of MS. This is IMO the great thing about what pharmaceutical science will do. They are isolating all the possible products from cannabis, will study, quantify and develop what products they can with effective doses, therapeutic windows, and side effects. Each product will be of consistent dose and quantity. In the near future, recreational users' argument that smoking marijuana has medical value will be rendered moot by the facts that dosage is too variable and side effects are probably higher than proper medical care and prescription. Plus, assuming the current legalization trend results in increased use, this will make smoking side effects more apparent and better quantified. At some point I expect there will be a healthy discussion on making marijuana smoking illegal again. As far as the review paper and all the possible therapeutic uses of cannabis products, I would only say that it reminds me of the stem cell discussion back in the 2000 election. Some or many of these targets will not pan out. On a side note, after the democrats made such a stink about funding embryonic stem cell research, isn't induced (adult) pluripotent stem cell research fascinating? If Bush had not taken the high profile moral stand against embryonic research, I wonder if science would have put the needed effort to develop alternative technologies like iPS?